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Something I’d been puzzling over myself. The scene in question, which occurs a couple minutes into Costa’s Colossal Youth (2006), a cinema pauvre exercise in painterly light and shadow (at Siskel Film Center 12/1 and 12/4), involves a woman on a bed nattering on about diapers, and more than once in this excruciatingly long, immobile take was I on the verge of tuning her—and the film—completely out. Then it suddenly dawned: it’s the same woman who played the emaciated, strung-out doper in Costa’s earlier In Vanda’s Room (2000) … but look what’s happened to her since. Then anorexic and wired, all exposed nerve endings, now more than a little zaftig, maybe even doughy, the edge-of-a-precipice energies rechanneled into (marginally) less frenzied methadone-inflected patter. Or: then emotionally scattered and unattached, now married and (marginally) more focused—unless it’s just dulled down—which she attributes to newfound love for an infant daughter, an inarticulate new spouse … but why then treat him so dismissively, like an unwelcome houseguest? That it took me as long as it did to recognize this quasi-actress/character’s (dis)continuities came as a kind of jolt—the tip-off was probably her hacking cough—but then I was thoroughly hooked: everything she said seemed resonant and pointed … because the underlying context had been radically reframed.
Ergo: “four stars”—does this ratify a film or the culture that produced it?
